All MLA citations follow the same checklist of elements to include. Is something missing? Just skip over it.
AuthorLast, AuthorFirst. “Article Title.” Name of Container, verbed by Some Contributor, version, number, Publisher Name, date, location. Second Container, location. Supplemental note.
In-text citations are the abbreviated form of the Works Cited citations: just enough for your reader to know which source a detail originally came from without taking up too much space inside your paper.
Use the first element of the citation -- typically an author last name. (Shouldn't come up for this assignment, but if there's no author, you'll use the start of the source title instead.)
Citation info is tacked on to the end of the sentence inside parentheses. If there is a specific page number in the source you can use, include that.
No page number? No problem -- it'll just be the author name. MLA doesn't want you to count paragraphs or make up page numbers... not even a "1" for a single web page.
Narrative in-text citations place the author inside the sentence instead of leaving for the parentheses. There are some extra rules to note here!
There are (at least) a couple ways we can cite these stories, since they've been published and republished. Note, though, that our parenthetical citations still all reflect the original author in these examples.
Here I've written the citation based on what was on the website, no more no less, even though clearly a 1948 story would not have been posted online originally...but honestly it'd look clunkier to try splitting it up, since New Yorker is the container both originally and currently.
Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery." The New Yorker, 26 June 1948, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery.
Parenthetical citation: (Jackson).
Here I've included the original publication date (1898) in a "supplemental element" slot after the title of source. I also added an access date since the website didn't say when it was posted.
Chopin, Kate. "The Storm." 1898. AmericanLiterature.com, americanliterature.com/author/kate-chopin/short-story/the-storm. Accessed 7 Feb. 2022.
Parenthetical citation: (Chopin).
In this example, because original publication info was noted alongside the republication info, I started my citation with info about the first New Yorker iteration, followed by info about the webpage I actually looked at to read it.
Barthelme, Donald. "I Bought a Little City." The New Yorker, Nov. 1974. The Dallas Morning News, 30 Aug. 2014, www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/books/2014/08/30/texas-classics-donald-barthelmes-i-bought-a-little-city/.
Parenthetical citation: (Barthelme).
Cushman, Keith. "D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Making of 'Odour of Chrysanthemums.'" Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 2, no. 3, Indiana UP, 1971, pp. 367–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053191.
Parenthetical citation: (Cushman). (Cushman 372). (Cushman 389-90).
Toth, Emily. "Kate Chopin's New Orleans Years." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Kathy D. Darrow, vol. 216, Gale, 2010. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420093469/LitRC?u=nhmccd_main&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=21807cf5. Originally published in New Orleans Review, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 1988, pp. 53-60.
Parenthetical citation: (Toth).
This list of sources should be...
All three major citation styles (MLA, APA, and Chicago) want a hanging indent for the full citation list that comes at the end of your paper. Your citations would each follow the shape of the shaded area below:
This is so your reader can easily match sources to your parenthetical citations (which are whatever sticks out first on the little tail) without having to read deeper into the citations, and this way each citation is visually distinct from the others in the list.
The absolute fastest and easiest way!
If something goes wrong -- like you do the shortcut but the indent is the wrong size -- or keyboard shortcuts just aren't your thing, try this out. Two different places to click, but same settings panel.